THE FOUNDER'S NEXT MOVE: What to Focus on at Every Stage of a Startup

You have a startup idea. What should you do next? Build an MVP? Find a co-founder? Talk to customers? Register a company? Look for investors? For many founders, the biggest challenge is not a lack of things to do. It is knowing what matters at the stage they are in - and what should wait. The Founder's Next Move is a practical guide to navigating the startup journey from the first idea to validation, MVP, early customers, product-market fit, funding, and eventually growth. Drawing on more than a decade of experience working with startups as a founder, co-founder, and advisor, Dainius Figoras focuses on a pattern he has seen repeatedly: founders often work hard on the wrong question at the wrong time. They build before validating the problem. They add features before understanding why customers use the product. They search for investors before knowing what the money needs to achieve. >This book helps you take a different approach. You'll learn how to: - Separate a promising idea from an untested assumption - Understand whether the problem is important enough to solve - Talk to potential customers without simply asking them if they like your idea - Validate demand before spending months building - Decide when to continue, change direction, or stop - Define what your MVP actually needs to do-and what it does not - Choose between a co-founder, employees, freelancers, an agency, or AI-assisted development - Find and learn from your first real users - Recognize the signals of product-market fit - Decide whether your startup is actually ready to scale - Understand bootstrapping, angel investors, venture capital, dilution, and fundraising - Find investors that fit your startup rather than simply chasing money >This is not a formula promising startup success. It is a framework for making better decisions under uncertainty. Whether you are thinking about creating your first startup, already building one, or starting again after a previous attempt did not work out, The Founder's Next Move will help you understand where you are, identify what you still need to learn, and decide what deserves your time, money, and attention next. You do not need to know how to build the entire company today. You need to know your next move.